if you're listening to this podcast it means you're hungry hungry for change hungry for growth and ready to have a major breakthrough in your business as a partner or founder in more than a dozen businesses that do more than five billion dollars in revenue each year Tony Robbins has learned from the best in the world the Steve Wynn's Marc Benioff and Peter goobers what it takes to be successful whether you've been in business for decades or are just getting started it's important to get help from someone who's been there someone is going to coach you
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today and now back to the podcast [Music] welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast I'm your host auntie org in a special episode you'll hear an insightful interview between Tony and his past friend and business partner Chet Holmes during his life Chet was known as one of the best sales and marketing experts in the world working with over 75 fortune 500 companies including American Express Merrill Lynch Estee Lauder and Xerox in short Chet was the master of sales systems and his teaching is still the foundation of sales education across the globe in this interview Tony talks
with Chet and breaks down the strategies that propelled his success they address real-life examples of companies that Chet advised giving you the tools to understand the market you're in and the exact hiring process you need to build a world-class sales team transform your business and experience exponential growth hi it's Tony Robbins welcome to the podcast this session is gonna be a very special one I have an opportunity introduce you to a dear friend of mine and a partner and a gentleman who's helped businesses from all over the world more than 75 of the fortune 500
and have sought him out he wrote the book the ultimate sales machine his name is Chet Holmes he's a gentleman who took Charlie Munger 9of Charlie Munger's divisions and literally doubled their sales in the first year something Charlie never seen and Charlie's multi-billionaire and one the most successful business men in the world so Chad has got quite a track record of making businesses go to a whole nother level what I love about Chad is he makes it so simple we're going to show you some principles in this interview that once you understand them you can
apply them whether you're a web marketer or you own a car dealership or you're you've got a candy shop you know someplace and in Korea doesn't matter where you are and we have people from all over the world who we reached out and said look we're different session this time we're gonna do a session where we're going to teach you some principles I'm gonna do my interview with our guest but we wanted to really troubleshoot your business a little bit so tell us what your challenges are and let's let him see if he can give
you some answers to that so it's amazing we got responses literally from all over the world through the web and we're gonna dress those in this session so it'll be a kind of a little workshop at the end of what the problem what's the solution how can we use some of the principles that we talked about here so I want to begin by just walking my dear friend chat I'm gonna see you buddy thank you I really appreciate you coming down and visiting I am I'm excited introduce people to you here I mean your don't
introduction for most people in business but I'm curious you started with very humble roots and you know now you're the guy that's called upon to do these turnarounds for giant corporations some of our clients will have recent clients we turned around is Billy and a half dollar company and and yet we're also able to turn around you know dentists dental offices you know I mean we really have the chance now to make a difference in every type of business every type of size because the principles you teach are so solid and so simple and they
work and they give a competitive advantage so how did you come up with this concept of how to create a competitive advantage it was different than everybody else of selling the same way marketing the same way we're did the drive for that come from and tell us just a little bit about you know your background how this evolved well we were poor you know as when we were growing up we were poor my father was a first he was a Marine combat instructor and then he came out of that and became a police officer and
five children and my mother didn't work so we were poor and I didn't like being poor you know so I was definitely driven to try and climb above that and then later in life I got into sales and I didn't like being treated like a salesperson so I found that if I was able to bring value beyond just the product that I was selling I could get more appointments I could get appointments with higher level executives and then when I went to work for Charlie we institutionalized it I turn it into a system and because
he didn't give me nine companies that wants to give me one and then I doubled the sales in it and then they gave me two more and then a double the sales of those and they gave me three more and so that's how I ended up running nine different divisions and then the first one I doubled three years in a row you know using the techniques that we're gonna talk to today so the the primary tool that I use to help people trying to track the widest possible audience is what we call education based marketing
and you and I have a client right now they're the largest home builder in the world or certainly in Mexico the largest it might be the third largest in the world and maybe probably be the largest in the world before they're done but these guys build 700 homes a week and there are New York Times Stock Exchange you know trade on the New York Stock Exchange basically they're out there all the time going you know buy a home X home buy a home X home by home X home in Mexico right and so we went
in there and again trying to always understand the market do research on it and most people never do this they don't really understand their markets like I talked to a group the other day and they were selling to lawyers and I said how many lawyers are there in the country nobody know they know their product and other service they don't know anything about the industries or the markets that they serve so we did this research and we went out there and we found out the biggest problem in Mexico is that people will live three generations
in one household I mean literally you will have 15 people living in a 700 square foot house there's a living room a bedroom and a bathroom I mean in the kitchen that's it very very tiny houses and their shacks and yet the Mexican government now is funding all the homes you want to possibly buy so you can go out of that Shack into a brand new home and they're taking the money out of your paycheck anyway so just like they do social security in the United States in Mexico that social security can be applied as
a down payment on a house and then the percentage that they take they'll just take it out of your pay and they'll pay the mortgage for you Wow so you know it's like why wouldn't you get a house and just motivating people to get out of that whole thing so we did some research we found out that an in crowded household the chance of infancy death is 400% greater than in a non crowded household if a little girl grows up in a crowded household because she's the lowest on the pecking order she learns she sort
of grows up with learned helplessness boys who grew up in crowded household are twice as likely to be a failure in life twice as likely to be an alcoholic females who grow up in crowded households are twice as likely to get pregnant younger you know so this is data so we tell you we took some of this data and we're there ads used to say by home ex home we're home X we hit build homes you know buy a home looks home and their agency at the time just said to us basically look you know
the advertising is not really you know gonna pull response I mean you know people are gonna buy a house whether they want to or not you can't really motivate people to buy a house we're just you know fundamentally just Brandi and I you know I don't buy that for a second by the way I do not believe it if you're advertising you should be pulling in response and it's a waste of money otherwise like while I'm branding let me pull some response so we started running the ads and we started saying you know did you
know the chance of infancy death in a crowded household his former percent greater did you know that blah blah blah and then you know we set up the whole stage and the first week that the ads ran the week prior the month prior they pulled seven phone calls there's a billion and a half dollar company right way so people know yeah and the first week they ran the ad they pulled what we thought at first whereas 1300 inbound phone calls later on we found out it was 2,300 because the 800 went into nothing because they've
over we filled up their voicemail nobody could answer any more call city they they were able to track 800 and lost calls and that alone for a company doing 700 homes a week in some weeks has boosted their sales 300 additional homes it's extraordinary and this is the value of education marketing it's it's knowing what your audience really needs to know in order to get them to understand what they need to do get in fulfilling the need after you've established what the real problem is and I've watched you do this again and again and just
any kind of industry you can imagine let's talk about let's say I have a little restaurant there's five people that wrote in to us and I'm in my restaurant and right now the economy's Titans people are spending more time at home they're eating less at the restaurants I'm really I got great food I got a great restaurant I got great service but I can't keep the restaurant full you know I'm advertising I'm spending more dollars in advertising before people are just not coming in and there are people right now like that that are closing up
take that case what would you do with us I know one of your strategies that you teach okay so we teach a concept it's called the best buyer strategy and so you probably eat out I don't know five nights a week I've sometimes it's seven nights a week for me because I'm traveling all the time so actually that's a good story because I can give you a case in point there's this little gourmet restaurant in a motel in our neighborhood and so I never even notice it's you know it's like Ricky's bar and restaurant it
says in a red neon thing and it's in a motel you know so it's not like I'm stopping in there you know but some neighbor of ours takes us there one night and that's like oh my god the food is fantastic you know it's really great so but the place is so we start going there regularly and I have food allergies and so I will tend to focus in my neighborhood in like three or four restaurants and then I'll train them so that if I take you out for dinner I'm gonna take you to a
place where I don't have to explain that i lured you to this and that and I the waiter already knows and then I tip them heavily you know so anyway I start going there a lot in the Suites F is great the food is fantastic I get I know the men you have to look at the thing and one Tuesday night were in there were the only people in there the restaurant is empty you know ghost town and he's got waiters and a bartender and you know a hostess and himself and kitchen chefs and cooks
in the back and Busboys I mean it's the whole place two people in the restaurant so you know he's losing money that night so I you know nudge him over and he comes over to me and I go how'd you like to sell this restaurant and it was like literally every table in the place fall and he goes like that's impossible like he can't he doesn't say that but you see it on his face and I go I only have one condition he says what's that I said I'll show you how to salt this restaurant
but my condition is I always get a table because I don't want to sell this and you know it's now become one of my favorite restaurants you know there's what he's thinking you're crazy like yeah no problem yeah sure okay fine so this is what we call best buyer strategy who's your best buyer and for those people you want to do something special because their best buyer so I had to talk him into this you know I said oh no look I've been coming here last week we came here seven days in a row just
as it worked out and three or four of those days I brought other people and my bill was 200 and 500 and 700 so what do you think I've spent in this restaurant in the last six months since I've been coming in here Serco thing I don't know I said maybe ten thousand dollars I said how many your diners that are coming in here spent ten thousand dollars he goes not a lot and I go well wouldn't you like to have just those kind of buyers in here he goes yeah well how do I get
them and I said well we use a thing called the best neighborhood strategy and people live in better you know in the big houses in the best neighborhoods they're probably out spending more money because money is a lesser issue than convenience that's what it is for me I eat out because it's convenient you know what I mean I don't have the time to cook and prepare and this and that so I said would you buy a dinner for people just to prove to them how good your restaurant is he goes and especially if they're gonna
be like me where they're gonna eat out a lot and spend a lot of money and you know buy the most expensive things than me or whatever the heck they won't bring frenzy and entertain he goes heck yes I I'd buy them a dinner in a second so little Direct Mail tip by the way you know the number one open thing Direct Mail let's say you come home you got all your bills bills bills and there's a greeting card what are you can open first you right to the greeting card so so I said send
a greeting card so you had this really nice invitation put together and it said you're invited on the front of the thing and it looked like a wedding invitation it's beautiful you know white you know nice expensive and you open up and it says because of who you are and because we think you're the kind of discerning client that we'd like to attract we are willing to buy you dinner in our restaurant just to prove how fantastic it is we have a five-star gourmet restaurant we're five minutes from your house which we know because we
can target the neighborhood we won and we would like to buy you dinner now when you come in and use this exact invitation because you're special and we want to treat you special so now the guy comes in with a thing and they know he lives in a mansion down the street you know so they're gonna treat him extra special so he does the Mahler and first place he does and I said do my neighborhood cuz 54 houses around a golf courses you do it to my neighborhood you know so I get it at home
and I'm like uh-huh so I stop in and go so how did it work he goes it didn't really work and I go really and go nobody you know nobody responded he said well no six people have come in so far and I go when was the last time you heard a direct mail piece pulling a 12 percent response rate you know send more invitations you know so anyway then I guess it's about four or five months later it's a Tuesday night and he's keeps sending these and he starts to get the hang of it
he's working the people over and he's doing strategic selling where you know first time at the restaurant oh let me tell you about this in gourmet now five-star organic food this and that blah blah blah and so when he's all finished I come back about six months later one day and I come in it's a Tuesday and I totally sold out no tables so I go like this guy I go where's my table he's ready to move one to get you there well they took one out of the kitchen put a nice white tablecloth on
it put it over in the corner my wife and I sat down and had dinner what's so beautiful about this strategy is it doesn't cost a lot of money it's really more people getting clear who is my ideal customer in this market or any market targeting those people and going and communicating ongoingly know if you already have a customer the most expensive thing we all have in business for most businesses is the cost to get your customer to get a client and most people spend all that money and then they start over and they try
to get out a client try to get another client we all know someone's not just a customer but I'm going quiet you don't have to spend all the marketing dollars anymore you've met their needs servicing them again is really valuable but you've used education marketing there to expand it you've been really humble I want you to talk about the specific results you're telling people the general theory but I'll give an example tell them the story share with us if you would what you did in the cleaning business that gentleman from New York because it's such
a great example business has been around forever institutionalized I mean you know hundreds of millions of dollars in business whatever the size the business was been around for X number of years share that story because the beauty of that was you took customers they already had that through education marketing right delta set is a very good example actually well of course this fellow sees me he's one of the largest carbon if not the single largest carpet cleaning company in the country but even so that's not a big business because most carpet cleaning companies are two
guys in a truck this guy might have thirty trucks and he serves three states I mean so for carpet cleaning he's a monster he's huge and he comes to me to ask me to help him get more clients and like you just pointed out I said well how often do your current clients buy and he says well they buy about once every three years and he had thirty thousand clients so if you do the math that's ten thousand sales a year so I said well what have you done to try and get them to buy
more often he says well we give them you know coupons and discounts typical tactical stuff right yeah so we go out again do the research right use the group that you and I use and we go out we go and we do some research and we find out lo and behold a PhD who is within who's the head of the indoor air quality studies for the Environmental Protection Agency had actually studied the impact of the quality of the health of your environment based upon the cleanliness of your carpet so we get this study and it
turns out that when the government did some microscopic studies of what was in the carpets they went uh you know I mean this is government buildings where the carpets are vacuumed every single day and they found Aspergillus and bacteria and dust mites and their feces in the bacteria that feeds on him it was nasty nasty stuff so they end up taking the carpets out of the buildings and they found people got sick or four times more often so with the Hawaiian carpets were so polluted why did taking him out make it worse because now that
stuff's getting in your lungs oh so the carpets like a filter it's like a drink a giant health filter wine but just like any health filter it needs to be sanitized and so even if you're vacuuming it every day that's not killing germs and bacteria if you look at the professional cleaners they come in with that boiling hot steam and the proper you know chemicals and they just disinfect the whole house so so we came up with this idea what's called the gold service and at first it was called gold member service and then Austin
Powers came out with that movie and I thought okay let's get away from the gold member and we just met the gold service and so then you'd call in you want to get carpets clean you go yes yes ma'am no problem give me your gold service number he's my gold service numbers say aren't you a gold service member and she go well no okay well you know it turns out and they would do that little education about the government and you know how they study and you know how you carpet should be cleaning about every
six months and so if your gold service member you clean every six months all these problems go away yeah plus we'll give you a discount because again if he can get his people buying twice as much you know so again that leads to the part three of our discussion today their whole systemization because I come up with the idea we call it the gold service he loves the idea of the guy here's it goes that's a great oh my god that's Fanta oh he just thinks that's great he thinks everybody's gonna buy this you know
that you can't if you get a discount and you only have to agree to clean your house twice a year that's not a big commitment and if you know that you really should because it's nasty stuff in your carpet so we just all thought everybody's gonna buy this so so we go out and now I'm gonna tell you guys you're gonna hear some of these ideas and the first thing people do the biggest mistake they make is they go when they change everything in their company all at once and their sales go down because you're
introducing something new you have to do it in very controlled in a very tested way so yet a part of it figure how it works yeah exactly figure it out before you go having everybody do it you know and everybody doing something different all at the same time and it's all different and you don't even know what the rules are you're gonna actually have a lower degree of results so that's where I've seen some of some of these ideas fail is that the boss goes up we're gonna switch everybody over to this no no no
let's take one guy you know we take their top producer and he does the service for a week he tries it and I get back on the phone with him a week later and the whole company's listening the CEOs listening and I go so how did it go he says uh it didn't work didn't work and we were all psyched for this you know he goes no it didn't work and I go well how many people had you offered to said how offered it to ten people so I'm first of all I'm thinking not a
big enough number let's test a bigger number and I said nobody bought it he goes well two people bought it but eight people said no so I mean to him that's a failure but let's do the math this guy has 30,000 clients he gets 10,000 buying a year if he got just 20% of them buying that gold service cleaning twice a year that 6,000 extra sales a year he's only doing 10,000 now a 60% overnight yeah but we ended up actually working on that idea for about six months to get it we're we're four out
of ten so I'm just saying a little lesson too if you're if you're listening you know a little bit of success can make a huge difference you know I mean in this case what was the final increase in it 100% hundred percent and it was a great like hundred years old yeah I thought was it was a family business right so 100 your generation what generation still offering discounts so hopefully everyone watching is gonna get out of this but I hope everybody gets out of this is if you do what everybody else does you're gonna
get anywhere else guess you know you can't the most you can get is an incremental improvement in your business if you offer the discounts or you throw out your auto ad and it says this weekend by now special sale but if you can find get inside the mind of your consumer and figure out what they need you can motivate them to buy and you can also get people to want to buy that never bought before or get your ideal client and figure out about their to buy but as you said you gotta systematize it not
once or twice you got to keep going at it the biggest challenge of most people having their businesses they try something and they don't extrapolate well the cattle if I change one thing I can change the result 100% I got to find that one little thing and then I got to make it a system within the business itself let's talk a little bit about salespeople all right one of the great things you've done today I go into business audiences and because of the web and because of the mentality of how so many people market today
many people think sales people are you know they're an expense you know they're too hard to manage you know my business doesn't need it and I've seen so many companies today that you just come in and we've done it you and I've done it with multiple companies coming to show them look make this little shift hire a few salespeople but the right ones people that it's their nature so you're not trying to retrain them 8 million times and you want sales go crazy so talk a little bit about of you what about salespeople why are
they you know you'd think people wouldn't have to know this but many business do why would they be a must and more importantly how do we get the right people that are highest performers because that's part of what made you successful you were one of those guys but you figure out how to get more of those yeah actually I didn't think I was anything special as a sales person I knew I had a lot of discipline as you know I have a heavy karate background but I certainly didn't think I was anything special and so
when I was breaking sales records and everything I just thought the only reason was because I was difficult to manage so companies avoided hiring guys like me because we were difficult to manage guys like you and so fundamentally I'm like well when I get in a position of authority I'm gonna hire nothing but guys who love to cold-call in the morning and you know and it became very difficult so I so I actually became obsessed with what is the kind of person who is very successful at sales and now we teach it as you alluded
to we teach it as a growth strategy is that if you can put people with serious horsepower into your company doesn't even matter what kind of company how small you are and there's a bunch of them you and I are gonna give as an example that you know it's just like I had a guy graphic designer and he had a business and he's a graphic designer so he didn't ever think about you know what he would do with this business except he would go out and chase business and when he got a client he'd go
and work on their deal and then they would you know finish and that we'd have to go get another client so I was always feast famine feast famine feast fam and I said to him lunch or hire a sales person and he goes well you know I yeah I I don't know I mean I can't even survive on the business I'm getting egglets cuz you don't have a sales person and you know you hire a guy whose whole job in the world is you business and that's gonna change your life I said well what's your
best so let's combine strategies here what's the best possible client you can get well it would be an identity package that's where I package everything from there you know logo to there shipping box to their business cards their envelope the full identity of the company what kind of signage they have you know the full identity and I go well how much you charge for that he says we're about $25,000 and I go and how many of those can you do in a month he goes well I could do for a month and I go and
if I brought you one of those clients right now identity package for 25 grand how much of that could you afford to give to me he said I can give 20% of since you give me 5,000 and you take 20,000 you'd be happy that yes and you can do four of those a month yes I said well that would be $80,000 a month for you and $20,000 a month for me if I'm your salesperson and he goes well I've I've never done $80,000 in a month and I go okay well so then you're willing to
pay me $20,000 a month if you make $80,000 a month right right okay great put that in your ad and let's see what kind of person you pull and so we teach this strategy because here's one of the key ingredients is that top producers have that psychological profile at any age and then we've designed all these techniques just to find them so here's one of the techniques um and you'll appreciate this and you'll get it right away is that what we do is we reject the candidates in the first 30 seconds of any conversation and
so let's say that I'm trying to find you top producers and I say to you okay Tony here's what I want you to do have one of your people set me up to screen ten people from five to six o'clock on Monday night and you same you're gonna interview ten people in an hour no I'm gonna decide who I want to interview okay so you set up to ten people in you and I get on the phone together and I've done this a hundred times and then I dial out and I bring the first guy
in so the first guy comes in he's just on the phone I say okay bill and you're listening and I go okay bill look we got 55 candidates for this job tell me why we want to interview you so bill goes well can you tell me a little bit more about the job and I go you know what bill that's a long conversation and one of the key lines we put in every ad it says don't even call you'll see my ads running everywhere right because I'm gonna this for years but it says don't even
call us you're the best so and can prove it or something like that and so I'll say bill the ad said don't even call us you're the best so we're determining right now who we even want to interview why do we want to interview you and nine out of ten this is what you get you'll get well let's see um I like sales and I like people and my mom says I'm real good at it and you know I believe if if I believe if if I really believe in your product I can sell it
and no matter what the guy says here's what we'll say we'll go I'm really not here on top producer you hear this silence and nine out of ten will go like this to go uh you're not and I'll go no complete conviction that you are not a top producer and the guy goes well well well oh okay all right well thanks for your time no problem bye-bye off the phone and that's how fast it is now what happens when you get a top producer is you can't convince him they're not a top producer I just
saved that guy two years of misery because if I interviewed him in a loving and supportive environment just like all people interview today you know HR friendly no offense to the HR people listening out there who hate me for this stuff but you know I mean it's like it's what happens is it shows you right away how the person responds when rejected and let me ask you a question its sales a loving and supportive environment or is it fraught with tremendous rejection on a regular basis so I had one guy say to me I go
like this I go I'm really not here on top producer and the guy says well maybe your death you know and he starts you know and then he starts saying cuz the last job I went into he said I was the new guy and after eight months I started passing people who've been there for eight years and the job before that I broke every record I'm like that's what I'm looking for he's selling I'm pushing him away he's pushing harder back and that psychological profile now here's the thing the real key and again you can't
discriminate by age so one of our key lines in our ads all say young or old if you have the stuff we'll know now usually that pulls me that 19 year old Tony Robbins jr. you know and he he believes in himself even though he hasn't proven anything doesn't have the track record yet and maybe he was a three bagger Wayne Dyer to calls it the three bagger and if you heard this right you know in the grocery store he's the guy with you know the other guy is only filling up one bag of groceries
the bagger and this guy's got three bags and he's did and nobody told him to do that it's not the standard nobody else's nature is dr who he is and so i'm like i'm like a radar for those people i am looking for them all the time because you know our our companies hire fifteen to forty-five people a week you know that's how fast we're growing right now and it's because these strategies are really you know helping people are really making a difference do you have the right mindset and skills to take your business to
the next level business mastery is the only event in the world created by tony robbins to prepare you to master the mindset and skills you need in business to elevate your game a one-of-a-kind immersive program business mastery will allow you to understand the critical factors impacting your business then refocus and realign with the strategy and psychology you need to compete and innovate in any economy remember business success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics if you're ready to learn and master the strategies to help you grow your business and stay competitive that don't hesitate apply for
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